“It’s what happens when Canada is run by a Prime Minister indistinguishable from a 17-year-old social justice warrior with an Instagram account.”

Terry Glavin tells Peter Stockland how disastrous reporting by the nation’s media created social panic, despair and reputational chaos

Journalist and author Terry Glavin

(Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series based on an interview with Terry Glavin, author of The Year of the graves: how the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves. Part Two will be posted later this week and Peter Menzies’s regular Monday column will resume next week)

On June 4, 2021, I asked a pointed question in Convivium magazine regarding “revelations” on May 27, 2021, that skeletal remains of 215 Indigenous children had been found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The question I asked was this: Why aren’t journalistic questions being asked about certain anomalies in the claims being made about my old hometown.

Among them:

• The bone of a three-year-old child was said to be among the remains. But how could ground penetrating radar identify a child’s age that precisely, and what was a three-year-old doing at a Residential School for kids aged seven to 15?

• How was it possible for 215 bodies to be buried without anyone noticing or commenting given that the school was directly across the river from a town of 10,000 people that was connected to the Reserve by the old wooden Red Bridge, which Indigenous people crossed and recrossed daily to shop, to hang out, and if necessary access medical care at the Royal Inland Hospital down the hill from St. Anne’s Academy Catholic School and up the hill from Sacred Heart Catholic Church?

• How in a town that elected Len Marchand as the first Indigenous MP in Canada – he was a former student at the school – could Indigenous children’s graves be opened and closed without anyone in authority noticing them being opened and closed?

• Was it possible the 215 bodies – none of which have been discovered to this day – were the result of successive waves of epidemics?

In the Convivium article, I made a point, too, of sharing credit for the prompting of these questions with a woman named Melissa Mollen-Dupuis. She had raised queries of her own in an interview with the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir. She asked this:

“Why weren’t journalists from the big media outlets in place (right after the revelations)? Why weren’t journalists interested in finding the names of the children, in talking to families, and understanding what happened? We’re talking about children, and about 215 children. That touches everyone.”

Ms. Mollen-Dupuis, it must be noted, was a co-organizer of the Idle No More protest movement that crippled rail traffic across Canada the previous winter with an Indigenous blockade at Belleville. Ont. She hardly qualifies as what would come to be called a “denialist” of historic injustices again her people. Yet even she voiced her anger and incredulity at the journalistic flaccidity in the face of a story that would lead to Canadian flags being lowered to half-staff for six months, a tsunami of claims of similar discoveries across Canada, and the burnings of churches across the land.

On the other side of the country, Vancouver Island journalist Terry Glavin was more than just dubious about the reporting of the Kamloops findings. He smelled something up, and it smelled awful.

“I knew it was bullshit the minute I read the first story in the New York Times. I knew it was bullshit because no one was asking the first question every journalist should ask about every story: ‘Is this true?’ I was also sure that most of the people who covered the story had never been on Indian reserve in their lives.”

Glavin, by contrast, had spent “basically the first half of my life in ‘Indian country.’” A winner of eleven awards for a his magazine writing, a reporter and columnist with major Canadian newspapers, and author or co-author of 10 books, he had written three books on Indigenous topics, including co-authoring a memoir of those who attended St. Mary’s Mission Residential School in B.C.’s Fraser Valley. By September that year, he had turned his questions into a 3,691-word article for Maclean’s magazine.

“And there it sat,” Glavin says. “It didn’t run. I kept asking what’s going on with my story? It’s been a month. It’s been two months. It’s been three months….”

What was going on, it turned, out was that the magazine was in ownership – and therefore editorial – turmoil and the business side as well as the editors were skittish about wading into controversy with hot-breathed new owners on their necks.

After many trials and tribulations, a version of Glavin’s story was published as “The Year of the Graves” in the National Post on May 26, 2022. It led the field in terms of nation-wide questioning of the Indigenous graves reporting without, as my Substack colleagues Peter Menzies and Anna Farrow noted last week, provoking essential retractions of the misleading journalism.

After many trials and tribulations, a version of Glavin’s story was published as “The Year of the Graves” in the National Post on May 26, 2022.

“It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had as a journalist,” he says.

Its hallucinogenic dimension was enhanced by Glavin having journalistically debunked a similar claim about “an archipelago of mass graves across the country (at) residential schools” 13 years earlier. He had traced the Ur story to a rather imaginatively untethered peripatetic Protestant evangelizer who found a calling feeding fish tales to politicized Indigenous habitués of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

“It was QAnon before there was QAnon,” Glavin says. “He was going around with all these crazy stories about how prime ministers and bishops and the pope were involved in pedophilia. That (morphed into) mass graves and children buried in the walls of residential school and Queen Elizabeth abducting children. It was all bullshit from the beginning but it kind of lingered.

“There were a lot of unwell Indigenous people around the Downtown East Side where the radical settler colonialism types kept the story alive because it made Canada look like a genocidal country, plus you could say bad things about Catholics which, forgive me, certain kinds of Protestants always like to do,” he adds.

The Proddie purveyor of prophetic nonsense ultimately became persona non grata on First Nations territories across Canada until the journalistically unchallenged claim from Kamloops reached the ears of then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“Before the end of that (2021) summer, there were 1,300 children allegedly found in mass or unmarked graves across the country and not one child was found in any grave. It was amazing how rapidly it happened. But it’s what happens when Canada is run by a Prime Minister who is indistinguishable from a 17-year-old social justice warrior with an Instagram account.”

Glavin proposes a paradoxical political escape hatch being provided to the PM by the Kamloops debacle, and not one that every cunning self-image fixated 17-year-old would have recognized. It had, after all, been six years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had delivered its multi-volume report that sagged under recommendation overload on achieving a historic reset between Canada and its Indigenous inhabitants. The Trudeau government had put into effect somewhere between bupkis, nada, zip and zero to implement those recommendations, especially one calling for national recognition of unmarked or forgotten Indigenous graves.

Coincidentally, that very week a year earlier - on March 25, 2020 - a previously obscure Black man named George Floyd was killed by a brutish cop kneeling on his neck on a U.S. street in broad daylight. Chaos, never far from the American surface anyway, erupted across the land of the brave, home of the free et al. The week of the Kamloops announcement marked the anniversary of Floyd’s death.

“Everybody in the States was banging on about George Floyd. There were commemoration marches, protests – George Floyd this and George Floyd that. So, Kamloops comes out and there must have been some people sitting around the cabinet table who’d been caught with their pants down, who said, ‘Well, we need our own George Floyd moment. They get to be all sorrowful about (injustice toward) Blacks, and we don't have anything that we can get upset about.’ That explains the massive public relations effort” to fan the flames of the Kamloops claims.

Whether or not history reveals that as the precise sequence, Glavin savvily notes how the atmosphere of ensuing racial crisis made it extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, for even journalists with B.S.-detectors in full sniff out mode to ask the essential questions that would have exposed the Kamloops’ stories dubiousness.

When Trudeau ordered flags lowered on federal buildings across the country a few days later, not even Kamloops Chief Roseanne Casimir clarifying that her First Nation had never used the term “mass grave” was enough to revive the spirit of journalistic inquiry

Students and staff at the Kamloops Indian Residential school

.“Who’s going to be the Indigenous leader who stands up and says, ‘there’s no mass grave?’ And if they’re not going to do it, who’s going to be the journalist who asks the Indigenous leader about whether the mass grave is true? Then the Prime Minister takes a knee and it’s like a Black Lives Matter thing. The media runs with it, and away you go,” Glavin says.

Let there be no misunderstanding. He’s not letting the media or journalists off the hook. They had the duty of their trade to ask the necessary questions before the country was seized by the “classic characteristics of a societal mania” and thrown in a paroxysm of self-loathing and physical violence.

“The journalist’s job is to be the one who speaks up,” Glavin says. “It reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where these cows are in a field and one of the cows looks up and says ‘Hey, we’re eating grass.’ Who’s going to be that cow? Who’s going to be that journalist? It fell to me.”

Fell, or was caught as a torch thrown from failing hands, it is Glavin’s lifelong fascination with, and full immersion in, Indigenous life that convinces him that it is they who lost most severely from the failure of Canadian journalists to do their jobs on the Kamloops story. The biggest setback, he says, was to the cause of reconciliation.

That will by my next post in The Rewrite.

(Peter Stockland is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)